which gave Lister a chance to go to England and, his countrymen. He would drain abscesses and apply dressings soaked in carbolic acid to them. If the stump turned red and the redness rapidly moved up the extremity, the patient was experiencing erysipelas, which we now know is the result of streptococcus. By the mid-eighteen hundreds, virtually all surgeons believed that there was no way to lower the then approximate 45% mortality rate caused by doing any sort of surgery! He noted the presence of "little worms" or "animalcules" in the blood and concluded that the disease was caused by microorganisms. Italian physician Francesco Redi provided early evidence against spontaneous generation. The germ theory of disease is the currently accepted scientific theory for many diseases. He enrolled in its medical school and graduated with honors in 1852. [15] In his On the Different Types of Fever (c. AD 175), Galen speculated that plagues were spread by "certain seeds of plague", which were present in the air. Lister used that chemical on a series of patients and lowered the frequency of wound infections to a third of its previous level. Joseph Lister read Pasteur’s work on fermentation and questioned whether micro-organisms might cause infections in wounds in the same way that it ruined wine and decided to experiment with using one of Pasteur’s proposed techniques, that of exposing the wound to chemicals. Before Lister's studies of surgery, many people believed that chemical damage from exposure to "bad air", or miasma, was responsible for infections in wounds. It is no objection to this view that the structure of the cholera poison cannot be recognized by the microscope, for the matter of smallpox and of chancre can only be recognized by their effects, and not by their physical properties. Although Snow's chemical and microscope examination of a water sample from the Broad Street pump did not conclusively prove its danger, his studies of the pattern of the disease were convincing enough to persuade the local council to disable the well pump by removing its handle. That became possible only in the 1860s and 1870s, when Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others further developed the germ theory of disease. As intimated in the 3 rd Huxley lecture, delivered before the medical school of Charing Cross hospital on October 2nd, 1900, Lister's interest in the germ theory of disease as it related to surgery probably stemmed from his investigation into the death of a little boy on whom he had operated for a suppurating infection of the elbow while a resident house surgeon. Robert Koch is known for developing four basic criteria (known as Koch's postulates) for demonstrating, in a scientifically sound manner, that a disease is caused by a particular organism. Nothing grew in the broths: therefore the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, as spores on dust, rather than being generated within the broth. Lucretius with Rev. There he continued to work on developing improved methods of antisepsis and asepsis. They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population, and afterward, they rejected Snow's theory. “An Address on the Antiseptic System of Treatment in Surgery” was a description of a new way of doing operations that he first presented in Glasgow, Scotland, where he … This is a part of the why and the where the term ‘internist’ came from, in that if any surgeon tried to do anything to the abdomen and chest, their/that patient would most assuredly die and so only non-surgeons (so-called internists) should treat patients with those types of problems. 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